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Many readers are sending the news that Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon has been released. Download options include mirrors and torrents. Wired has a review based on the release candidate: "Gamers and hardcore media hounds may still feel left out... but we found playing music and watching movies in the new Ubuntu to be every bit as pleasant as it is under OS X or Windows... Wi-Fi, printing, my digital camera and even my iPod all worked immediately after installation — no drivers or other software required... I did have to install additional codecs to get MP3 and Windows Media Audio support."

I'm actually really excited about this. We've got a demo running here. We installed it on a two year old notebook and everything just worked. Pointed Evolution [gnome.org] to our Exchange server, and it just worked. Which IMHO is key, I love to hack things just as much as the next guy, but if I have to hack things just to get them to work the first time, its a major turn off.

Please bear with me -- I'm still on the Ubuntu learning curve... If I do as you suggest there, will that upgrade my "Feisty" to "Gutsy Gibbon" without losing my files, accounts, directory structure, etc? Will I need to reinstall video drivers and reconfigure my screen resolution settings again? (The latter was a real headache the first time around...) I can't find a straight-forward answer anywhere.

I understand the perspective of focusing on one thing (music, in this case), and doing it well, instead of creating a bloated jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none app.
However, after getting an iPod, and managing it primarily via Amarok, it would be nice if Amarok handled video, as it's a nuisance to load gtkpod and endure a re-scan of the iPod's contents (as I don't manage my music with it) just to add a video. Especially in a KDE environment.
On a side note, it's also pretty annoying that I can transfer album art via Amarok, and it appears on the unit, but photos transferred via gpixpod don't seem to appear on my 5.5-gen video iPod.
If functionality/stability doesn't suffer, I'd love to see future versions of Amarok broaden their focus to personal media player administration.

While Ubuntu on the desktop is the bee's knees, server leaves me unimpressed. While I'm not expecting a "big-iron" capable monster with every service imaginable, what I would expect is the "Ubuntu touch"; The most useful, advanced and friendly services at the "administrator's" fingertips, easily managed, configured, etc. LAMP is a nice start, but how about a full sweet of ready to go "stuff". XMPP, SIP, VPN, Doc Mgt, etc. If Ubuntu could do for servers what they've done for desktops, well, that would be really good.;) In the interim, I'll stick with CentOS (no, I'm not comparing CentOS to Ubuntu).

A partial, eventual solution to this is to support Linux and independent gaming. For example the expansion to Dominions3 [shrapnelgames.com] came out today and is for sale at Gamer's Front [gamersfront.com]. Dominions is a fantastic strategy game, I can play it in Linux (or Mac & Windows), it's from a small independent game company, and it's for sale by Gamer's Front (who support independent games).

Win, win, win, win...

It's a bit pricey retail ($54), but comes with a 300 page manual, and the coupon "DOM3-STARDOCK" will get you 20% off until November 15th, making it quite reasonable..

I'm not affiliated with them, it's just pretty much the only game I bother to play these days.

You underestimate the progress Wine has been making. I too am currently playing Company of Heroes and Supreme Commander, and they run better on my Gentoo install than they do with many of my friends' XP systems. Admittedly, they've been in a playable state for only about two months now, but for example C&C 3 worked great the day it was released. Also, Wine has already started it's DX10 implementation, and as that progresses, it'll make linux "instantly" a superior platform for gaming when compared to XP. If you want to play games on linux, than try them with wine, see what doesn't work and post a bug report. Until linux gains enough market share to attract developers, that's the best thing you can do.

Windows s* Windows Vista or Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 2 or later* iTunes 7.4 or later

I don't see a Linux option.I don't see a "non iTunes" option.And apple sells the whole package as they do with everything they sell.

Off topic----Note: I am an Apple user. I have both a MacBookPro and a Debian server. I tried for the longest time to get stuff onto my iPod from the debian server since that's where my music resides. I couldn't find any command line programs to do it. I even had conceptualized a nice little bash script that after I plugged my iPod in, I'd run it and it'd sync everything. I gave up and just use iTunes over an NFS share over Wireless, sure it takes a while but I set it before I go to bed. (Initial sync was over ethernet).

Where are all the linux developers making nice stable non 'flair' programs? Why can't someone make a nice stable cli interface to the iPod and then write a GUI wrapper around that? I've been looking *forever* for CLI RSS torrent grabber. It doesn't even have to be a program, just a simple script will due. OS X has a nice program called TVShows.app, it's just a nice GUI wrapped around a ruby script that reads an XML file. I tried but the script doesn't run under Debian. Shiny programs are nice to keep up with the OSX/Vista crowd but what happened to the developers that make good dependable programs for the command line?

I have beryl installed in feisty and it's working great. should i disable or uninstall prior to upgrading or will the installer see it and disable compiz. just wondering since compiz is enabled by default.

I sympathize, and up until Feisty I had such a difficult time getting Linux up and running that I never got far enough to consider using it as a viable gaming platform, but over the past week I've had a total change of heart. I use my computer to check email, browse the web, write, store and play music and video (of multiple formats), stream video and music over a LAN, and play games. Lots of games. In fact, I'd say that games account for 80% of my usage time.

I'd been running Vista and it was a disaster. I have an Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX, which doesn't support DX10, so even when I got Bioshock I never really benefitted from that aspect of Vista. Long story short, Vista turned me off so much that I now dual boot XP and Ubuntu, with the idea that I'd use Ubuntu as sort of a project to noodle around with, getting used to Linux in anticipation of XP's future abandonment.

Two weeks in I've been pleasantly surprised by how well Ubuntu works and how much I don't need XP. Everything non-game related works great, and I've even made inroads towards weaning my girlfriend off of iTunes. Wine runs EVE well after some mucking about with settings. I still need XP for Bioshock, but HL2 seems to work fine. I have yet to try BF2142 and I have some older games I'd like to try out but so far I'd characterize it as a net success.

So yeah, I agree wholeheartedly that games are important, but people who ask me for recommendations as to software tend to be friends/family that will subsequently ask me to install and maintain said software, and on that basis I'd much rather set them up with Ubuntu than XP or Vista. With my admittedly limited experience with Linux, I still like that when things go wrong in Linux they seem to go wrong for obvious reasons and be relatively straightforward to fix, where Windows does so much mysterious crap in the background it seems like problems just arise out of the ether. I get the impression that extended use is not intended use, unlike with Windows.

As it stands now, I no longer consider XP to be my main os. I basically consider Ubuntu my "serious" os, and the XP partition as essentially the same as my Wii: a console for a few specific games.

It's very nice to upgrade - when you choose from the menu: System > Administration > Update Manager, it lets you upgrade the entire OS with the click of a button.But it doesn't download using a BitTorrent, does it? So who's going to pay for all the bandwidth? It freaks me out..

Check out Cowon's iAudio line. I have an 60GB iAudio X5, and after a year and a half I am still absolutely thrilled with it. It beats the piss out of iPod for functionality (FLAC/OGG/WMA/MP3 compatibility, video, an interface that doesn't suck ass, text file reading, FM radio, audio in/out, recording from radio/audio in/internal mic, and on and on and on), and is substantially cheaper than an iPod of comparable size. I didn't see the X5 on their website, maybe they're phasing it out for the newer models, but check them out. Anecdote: I dropped it in a pile of melting snow one drunk night in my front yard and didn't find it until the next afternoon. Turned right on, no water under the screen or anything, good as new. True story.

the touch round scroller appears to me to be unmatched

I hate them. There is no tactile feedback, so I can't operate it without looking at it, which is a total dealbreaker for me. I bike a lot, I can't be pulling the thing out and trying to look at it in traffic. With my X5 (which has a mini-joystick), I can navigate the whole thing without looking at it.

I installed the package msttcorefonts (somewhere in the stock kubuntu repo's, anyhow), allowing for some of the fonts that MS made open. Granted it's not as optimal as having nice "stock" fonts, but it's definitely cleaned things up for me, esp. in word processors and text-editors.

I do media production and have always used either Windows or OSX (or both) for my work, in applications such as Logic, Sonar, Premiere, Wavelab, etc. I had tried several times to offload some of this work to a Linux box, but it had never really worked out for me. Either I couldn't get Linux to work with my pro audio hardware, or the applications couldn't do what I needed them to do. I'd always end up back in Windows or OSX.

After an ugly experience with Vista, that came pre-installed on a high-end box that was to become my primary production system (once I upgraded back to XP Pro), I decided it was time for me to make a serious attempt to do my work in Linux again. I'd lost a lot of confidence in the major players (MS and Apple) to serve my needs over the next 10 years. Plus, I had some problems with the way those two companies do business. So, I took the system (the one that the Vista machine was to replace) and installed Ubuntu Studio (Feisty).

The first thing I noticed was that with only a few very easy tweaks (for DVD and codecs), everything was working. My dual-monitor video card and audio hardware worked "out of the box". The audio engine, Jack, was a little bit of a pain to get working, but mostly because of my own inability to read a how-to, but once it was working, the applications that came (for free) such as Ardour were more than just decent.

So finally, I had a secondary system on which I could do a host of pre- and post-production tasks. It gave new life to a system that would otherwise have gathered dust or have been given to a nephew on which to play games. Every day, I find new ways to make use of the Ubuntu Studio box, and I find myself sitting down at that system more and more often. Oh yeah, I didn't have to pay five grand to buy second licenses to the production applications I use because the ones that came with Ubuntu were free.

So, I still use Windows for the bulk of my work, but little by little, the Ubuntu Studio system is making inroads. I'm losing the uncomfortable feeling of being locked in to one of two companies for my operating system, and I'm less afraid that once Microsoft stops supporting XP, I'll be SOL. The impressive improvements that have occurred in the last 4 years and the great new programs that the OSS community has developed will continue, I assume. I keep hoping that one of the major music software developers will put out a native Linux version so I can make the divorce from Microsoft final.

Hell, I've even figured out how to play Eve-Online on the Ubuntu Studio machine.

PSP plays OGG vorbis if you homebrew it. My car stereo supports OGG wonderfully but fails horribly at VBR MP3 file playback. Guitar Hero uses the OGG vorbis format for it's music files, so that means PS2/PS3/XBox/360 play it (maybe not natively but the game has the software for playback built-in)
Yup, OGG is certainly catching on, you're just not opening your eyes and looking for it hard enough.

* plug in a USB memory stick, make some changes, rady to take it out. In Ubuntu, "Safely remove" is one click away in the context menu, and does exactly what you would expect. XP pops up some unintelligble menu of USB root devices and it's 3 clicks until you get to remove it.* plug in a USB printer. In Ubuntu 7.10, it appears in your printer list automatically. In XP, you have to find the drivers, install the drivers, finish the "new hardware wizard"...* need more multimedia codecs? In ubuntu, it'll prompt you to install them, then do so. In XP, you have to search the web for them, install some third-party software, repeat until you find some that work.* want to edit a.doc or a.ppt? In ubuntu, OpenOffice is installed by default. In XP, you have to go buy a retail box of Office 2003/2007/etc.* install/update/remove thousands of third party applications. In ubuntu, it's all in the package manager, there's a "new updates notifier", and there's no reboot unless you upgrade to the newest version of the OS. In windows, you only get updates for Microsoft products, and those all require a reboot (and upgrading to the latest OS requires $400 and yet more CDs).* 3d desktop effects - ubuntu 7.10 has 3d desktop effects enabled by default, where your virtual desktops are on a spinning cube, windows can be consumed by flames when you close them, and there's 3 or 4 alternatives to boring old alt-tab. Windows Vista can give you an orthographic view of your windows when you hit alt-tab and that's about it. XP doesn't have such effects(a small percentage of which improve productivity) and it never will.* migration - Ubuntu can find and import many settings and files from your windows drive during install. XP just barely acknowledges that other OSes exist, and will blow away other partitions unless you've partitioned in a very particular way.

For all purposes other than games, Ubuntu has long since been surpass XP in usability and user friendliness. "Average users" are not doing those things that require XP; average users surf the net, send email, and write word documents.

When you try to play an MP3 file in Ubuntu, you get a message box saying that MP3 support is not installed. It will ask you if you want to install it. If you answer in the affirmative, it will go and download Fluendo's binary-only MP3 GStreamer codec. And then you have MP3 support. As far as I know, this is zero cost.

The licence of that binary-only component makes it rather difficult to distribute as a core part of he distribution. So Ububtu are already doing everything they possibly can, by having it install itself the first time it's needed.

Something similar happens when you try to play pretty much anything that needs a non-free or patent encumbered codec (anything from the gstreamer-ugly collection, for example).

In Windows, I need to install extra software to play anything but MP3 and WMA. On Mac OS X, I need to install extra software to play anything but MP3 and AAC / M4A. Windows Media Player has a plugin finder service, which is great and all, but only works for Microsoft media formats. iTunes has nothing. How the hell is a Windows user supposed to know what they have to install to play an M4A file? How the hell is a Mac user supposed to know that they have to download Flip4Mac to play WMA or WMV files, and that they still won't work in iTunes?

The point is that media support sucks on all operating systems, unless you happen to be using the formats that are included with the OS.

I've been on 7.04 for a while now. and there were a few things about it that I just love...The one I like the best is when I went to the command line and typed 'sux' for the first time.it told me sux was not installed but that I could install it by installing some package or another.That was Nirvana for me with 7.04.Other then that the sound continues to work when I switch users, the WiFi is now 100% instead of 75% and the new intel video drivers mean the OpenGL stuff actually works.

I hope 7.10 has some equally cool things hidden in it.p.s. anybody know if 'ionice' is installed by default yet?It would be a good idea cause Beagle indexes on startup and can really slow down DVD performance.